[lug] Frustrated

[Matt James]

Hi all,
   Here is my story and I submit this plea in hopes of
finding some way to eleviate some of my frustration. 
I'm a die hard DOS and Windows person because I'm a
victum of Microshaft.  For the last ohh year or so I
have been trying to learn Linux/Unix and have gotten
real mad in a real hurry.  I have a few different
systems that I have tried a multitude of things on and
I have gained little ground.  I guess how it all
started is I got a SPARC 5 station donated to me as
something to "Learn" on.  I have successfully
installed Solaris 2.5.1 on it and have learned some
basic commands and such for browsing files and some
VERY basic network type commands such as netstat.  I
have tried  to get a number of things to work on it
with no luck.  Been to TAR.GZ hell trying to figure
out how to get the thing to do anything.  Have yet to
figure out how to make TCP/IP work on the thing.  I
was told I don't have a compiler on the machine yet
when I download the compiler it says I need a compiler
to "Make" it. (which came first the chicken or the
egg?)  I have attemprted to do the same with both RH
and Slackware linux on my Intel PIII 1000 machine and
had slim to no luck.  Everyone I seem to talk to blows
it off like it is some sort of walk in the park to get
linux up and running.  I however have had nothing but
problem after problem.  When I start the install I get
all kinds of crap about how my hard drive won't format
and that it can't write here or can't read there and
the install just quits.  However I know the drive is
good because ole winblows will go right on with no
problem at all.  I tried this on both the Intel
machine with RH 7.2 and on the SPARC with RH 6.1 and
nothing seamed to want to work.  Slackware went on the
intel and crashed in the first day of running it - no
fancy stuff mind you - installed it - left it running
- went to setup Apache and the machine froze and never
worked again.  So I finaly gave up and went back to
Win 2000 (Been running for over a year straight
without one hickup at all - believe it or not) Long
story to make a point I guess - I'm not very impressed
with this so called wonderious operating system
"Linux" as of yet.  I realize I probably offended some
people in this message so I apologize in advance but
I'm looking for advice on how to make things go a
little easier becasue I would like to learn how to
make this work.  Any help or comments (nice or not)
would be appreciated.  Thanks in advace.
Matt

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